Demonstrating the new hybrid AF and Active IS systems of the Lumix S5II

New focusing and stabilisation systems make the Lumix S5II an ideal camera for lightweight and simple run-and-gun shooting, says Damien Demolder

This film was made with the Lumix S5II and the Lumix S f/1.8 lenses. I relied on the AF system throughout to hold focus on the subject, and the Active IS system to keep the camera steady. The camera was handheld in a cage and in the shoulder mount, with no additional external or post-production stabilisation

The new Lumix S5II brings us additional features that work hard to make the film-maker’s life more straightforward. These include the camera’s new hybrid AF system and the enhanced image stabilisation that comes with the Active IS function. These introductions to the Lumix system relieve the videographer of two key tasks, and in so doing give us the head-space to concentrate on other elements of the shoot safe in the knowledge the camera will handle focusing and stabilisation for us.

DFD + PDAF

Panasonic’s new hybrid AF system performs so well we can leave it to handle both finding the subject in the frame and to tracking it as it or the camera moves during the shoot. If you were a manual-focus sort of person previously this will mean that you are now free to take the camera off the tripod, open the aperture for more ‘risky’ shallow depth-of-field effects and to allow the distance between the subject and the camera to vary without you having to constantly check you’re holding focus. It also means we can go from a static shot to a moving shot without having to spend time planning how we’ll do it, rehearsing movements, switching supports and dropping markers on the floor to make sure the talent remains in the sharp-focus zone.

This is a recording of the feed from Lumix S5II made with the Atomos Ninja V. It shows all the information displays on so you can see how the camera was able to track the subject around the screen, and find her again when I dropped the camera down to talk to her. This is the whole uncut interview which is over four minutes long, but I’ve included all of it here so you can see how the AF held on perfectly for the whole duration. There are no instances in which I had to cover the interview with B-roll because the focus dropped out.
As a side note, I was able to create a LUT specifically for this scene as we’d rehearsed the lighting a couple of days before and I had footage of a stand-in talking to the camera. I made the LUT in Resolve and loaded it to the camera to use for the LUT Assist preview while I recorded in VLOG. In retrospect I could have loaded the LUT into the Real Time LUT menu and burnt it straight into the footage in-camera, as I didn’t need to make any changes to the footage in the grade. Next time I’ll do that

For the interview scene in this film I used a wide f/2.8 aperture with the Lumix S 85mm lens, which didn’t leave the camera much room for mistakes, but the system proved more than equal to the task. With initial tests done it became clear that I could just leave the focusing to the camera, which freed my head for framing, making relevant camera movements and listening to what the subject was saying. Sudden movements didn’t upset the system and neither did taking the subject out of the frame entirely and bringing her back in again – the camera just found her and locked on again. I tried shots in which I started a pan with an object closer than the minimum focus distance and then brought the frame round to include the subject to see how quickly the camera could detect a human from the madly out-of-focus view presented to it. I was pleased not only with how well the face was found but also with the smooth nature of the focus pull from an extreme close-up position to the subject’s face.

Here we were filming a ‘runner’ from a moving car to see how the AF would be able to track a subject that shifted around the frame a lot and which would be interrupted by passing objects. It was a practice for the car-to-car filming, but with a more challenging subject

The speed of the focus pull can be customised by the user to make focus transitions quicker or slower according to the nature of the effect required, but in the default ‘0’ position a nice balance is achieved. The speed of detection can also be adjusted via the sensitivity controls in the AF menu, so we can determine how swiftly we want the camera to change subjects when a likely alternative is introduced. Typically this will be useful when a new object appears in the frame, so we can tell the camera whether it should ignore it or refocus on it.

This shows how the camera’s AF system can detect new subjects entering the frame and pull the focus to them – and then back to the face again. The AF modes were all in the default settings, but with the camera’s AF Custom menu we can alter the characteristics of this sort of transition

If we are filming a person and lots of other people are walking between the camera and the subject we might want the sensitivity set to a low value so the camera doesn’t react. If the subject though holds up something we want the viewer to see, setting sensitivity to a higher value will let the camera know to refocus as soon as it sees something new in the frame that’s closer to the camera than the original subject. When you want the camera to pull away from a face more quickly switching off Human Detection will speed things up, but you may find that isn’t necessary as the camera reacts pretty quickly anyway.

This video shows the effect of the new Active IS system, and compares footage with it on and off. In the clips I was walking backwards as the subject came towards me, and forwards as I followed him. My backward walking always creates more camera movement than when I’m walking forwards.
I noticed afterwards that the AF mode was set to AF-S instead of AF-C, but the camera still maintained focus on the face perfectly

The new Active IS is designed specifically to tackle the more dramatic jumps and bumps we get when walking with a camera, as well as when we are using a very long lens. Active IS is a new algorithm in the camera’s firmware that comes on automatically when it determines it’s needed – it isn’t a separate menu item for users to manually activate.

For the Rally Girl film I used the Lumix S f/1.8 series lenses which don’t have their own in-lens stabilisation systems, so all the stabilisation at work was in-camera through the movement of the sensor. The camera also offers E-Stabilisation for video shooters, but that crops the frame a little and I really wanted to see how good the new system is on its own.

While Active IS doesn’t make me look as though I’m on a hover board or traveling on rails it does still have a very powerful stabilising influence - to me it resembles the effect we get from wearable stabilisation rigs that some cameras operators for big production cameras. The footage still has the tale-tell motion that we expect with a handheld camera but jitters and bumps are smoothed away leaving a more gentle swaying effect when we are moving. When standing still the footage can be really very stable indeed, but with the slight shifts in angle that tell the viewer the camera isn’t locked onto a tripod.

The influence of Active IS in handheld filming really is quite significant as it makes a big difference to the way handheld walking shots look, and a lot of what would otherwise be unusable will now look great – even without the post-production stabilisation that costs us the edges of the frame.

Making it possible